...more recent posts
Today's photo is of the Hindenburg burning over Lakehurst, NJ on May 6, 1937. No reason except it is kind of a cool picture. As usual, this is stolen from the BBC which is running an article on a new German Zeppelin being made for large cargo lifting needs. (Not too interesting, but I liked the picture.)
I finally found a table which explains those cryptic Mac error messages.
I've been wasting time lately in the FoRK Archive. Smart (insider-ish) discussions on what is happening in the high tech world. Like many cool things, I found this through Hack the Planet which is also full of smart (insider-ish) discussions on ...
Photoshop 6.0 hits beta. If you work with images, you probably work with Photoshop. Adobe is calling this a major upgrade (but of course they would.) Apple Insider has the preview scoop.
From Barbelith comes this gem: "I'm sorry, but Jeffrey Zeldman rocks so hard and fast he could vibrate himself through a mountain." Here's the Zeldman piece in question, which Tom calls, "a call to arms, a Manifesto for the true digerati - the people that like to play and create and communicate, rather than the people who consider a "good internet idea" to be selling sportswear (however ineffectively)...."
What about the idea that keeping a weblog (especially if you work in front of a computer all day, and take small random breaks from your work to do a little blogging) is a way for information workers to maintain a sense of self in an otherwise depersonalizing situation (i.e., the long hours many spend doing mundane information processing tasks for their corporate benefactors.) Maybe the small amount of time lost to these personal pursuits is O.K. in the end as it allows workers to always maintain a little loop of their own personality in the background. The weblog is an excuse to see and comment on things that are important to you personally, and you can do this pretty much continuously (espcially, like I said, if you work in front of a computer all day.) I know Alex has commented that this sort of personal project can really make working for someone else bearable (or even just acceptable.) And while people have always done this (like reading on the job when things are slow, or writing a personal letter) the concept of micropublishing your thoughts for others, and the pressure to keep updating your blog, makes the weblog sort of time wasting much more valuable for maintaining a sense of self that is separate from your job. I'll have to work on this idea a little.
It didn't reduce very well, but today's picture is a piece by Paul Laffoley. A bigger version of this picture is here (112kb) I first heard about him at the disinfo conference a few months ago. In my opinion, the most interesting speaker at that strange event. Anyway, I bought a book of his work at that time, and then MB gave me an original for my birthday. I'll try to get a picture of that up. Here's some more info about him. And here's a reproduction of his piece "Geochronmechane: The Time Machine from the Earth." Yes, he has actually designed a time machine, and I don't doubt that it will work. Unfortunately, to test his idea, we'd have to put this huge machine into orbit, and then drill a hole all the way through the earth. I'll guess there will be a little delay before the jury comes back in on that one.
More conflicting info about my next computer. zdnet has a piece about new G3's due this fall from IBM with clockspeeds from 500 - 700 mhz. The article speculates that these will go into the next generation powerbooks which they anticipate sometime in the fall. D'oh. What about the G4e that a different IBM spokesman said we'd see in a portable before the end of the year? I guess that was too good to be true. This new time table seems more reasonable. New G3 powerbooks in the fall. OS X and multi-processor desktop G4's in January, and THEN the G4e powerbook in the spring. Not quite as fast as I'd hoped.
Lars finally responds on the Metallica/Napster imbroglio. I guess it's easy to make fun of Metallica, but I have less and less good feelings for Napster. I wish there was an open standard in place so that the "free information" side wasn't in a position to make a boat load of money off the whole thing. Seems like that sort of ruins the argument. But could a napster clone, without any corporate backing, make it beyond the small percentage of super geeks?
Lots of talk in the news lately about possible break up scenarios for Microsoft. I haven't been commenting because it all seems like talk at this point. But reading the Times today (that's what I do when I go get my coffee in the morning) it all came together for me. First off, even though I don't try to hide my anti-micorosoft bias, I am not in favor of the government getting involved in breaking them up. I rarely favor any sort of government intervention in any situation. The less Washington does the better. Still, I think Microsoft makes bad products. And not so much because I have some insight into how the code is written (I've never seen any of it) but because I disagree with their whole philosophy of producing computer products. Anyway, my dream would be for Microsoft to lose marketshare because consumers educate themselves enough to learn how it is that Microsoft is holding the whole computer/internet revolution back. In other words, they should lose on their own merits. Fat chance, I know, but the marketplace is the proper regulatory mechanism. As long as people insist on buying Windows, we all get what we deserve (i.e., buggy, virus prone, unsecure software.) So, my thought today was that the government CAN actually play an important role in all this. But not by trying to control Microsoft's actions through legislation and court actions. Instead, what I think should happen is that the government should review Microsoft and their products, and if they come to the conclusion (as Judge Jackson appears to be doing) that Microsoft is not making the best products if you take the health of the industry as a whole as your context, then the U.S. government should stop all of its arms from buying Microsoft products. To employ one of my least favorite terms: they should use their position as a "bully pulpit" to help educate users about the problems with these products. An example of this is the US army switching from NT based servers to Apple servers after a rash of security problems. Since the switch - no more problems. If all branches of the government dumped all Microsoft products (with maybe a yearly review of Microsoft, giving them the chance to change their ways) this would go much further to correcting the problems then just breaking them up into 2 or 3 (or even 5) seperate (monopolistic) companies. The government should lead by example, not by legislation. Corel actually sued the government a few months ago because they were buying Microsoft Word without any review of competing products (which is required by law for all government contracts.) This should happen on a much larger scale.
After a few months of quiet (following the not ready for primetime Netscape 6.0 preview release) the Mozilla project is again picking up steam. First up, it look like Activestate will be bringing Perl and Python into the Mozilla development environment. Says ActiveState project leader Dr. David Ascher, "By providing bridges between Perl and Python and the Mozilla framework, we are giving the Perl and Python Open Source projects deep access to the power of Mozilla." Becasue remember, it's not just a browser. In other news, alphanumerica has written code that will allow javascript inside mozilla easy access to local filesystems. They have based this on the very easy to use PHP filesystem functions. All code has of course been released free to the community. They built this input/output system because they needed the functionality to build their mozilla crash recovery system. With this layer installed in Mozilla, the browser will continuously track the state of all open Mozilla windows, and in the event of a program or system wide crash, will be able to restore the state of all windows on reboot. (!) I wonder how much of a speed hit you take for running this? In any case, very cool, and this could be incredibly important as the web morphs from a page based model to an application based model. Who wants to use a web based application (word processor, spreadsheat, ect...) if you lose all your data everytime your browser crashes?
The BBC has this amazing story about the development of a tiny pill with a camera inside. The pill can be swallowed by a patient, and doctors can view the video feed from inside the body. "The researchers believe patients will find the capsule hugely preferable to the current endoscope technology which requires a fibre optic cable to be put up the back passage." I'll say.
Slashdot has a poll today asking how people like their steak. I am pleasantly surprised to find "I don't eat meat" is actually in the lead (25% to 22% for "medium rare.") I knew that junk food and caffeine were staples of the geek diet, but I have never heard anything about vegetarianism. Anyway, in the comments that follow the poll, somebody posted this short sci-fi story vaguely related to the topic. Very amusing. (This post largely stolen from rasterweb.)
testing
testing 123....
this is a test...
IBM announced today their new SOI (Silicon on insulator) chip technology. This is a long sought after step in the ever shrinking chip wars. IBM has clearly established itself as the technological leader. This will not only speed up the speed of chips, but also reduce size, heat dissipation, and energy requirements. We'll see these new chips in large IBM systems first, but the sfgate article (link above) quotes IBM as saying that the new chips "will appear in a portable device this year." Since IBM doesn't make chips for the Wintel world, I've got to think this means Apple. Go IBM. This could not only break through the speed plateau that the G4 seems to be stuck on, but also solve the heat problems with putting these things into the Powerbook. If Apple can ship a +700 mhz g4 powerbook before Jan (especially in a graphite ibook like shell) I doubt they could make enough to satisfy demand.
Slashdot has this link to a german magazine (link is to english translation) which is reporting that the EU is set to lift all export restrictions on encryption software. The U.S. is traditionally against this, and is reportedly upset by the decision.
I'm very interested in the EU, but unsure how to get more information. I guess traveling is one good way. Seems to me like they (the EU government(s)) are much more clued in than the US, but people are always telling me that freedoms are much greater here. I'm not sure, but the Netherlands and Switzerland (to name two) seem much more open. (Although I've never been to either place, so my opinion probably isn't worth much.) Simply comparing the percentage of the population incarcerated between the US and the EU (or Russia, or China, or South Africa) would lead one to believe that either a) US citizens are somehow a priori more likely to commit criminal acts, or b) the US has less freedom. What's the deal?
The folks at Temple ov thee Lemur have built a stripped down web server run on the electircal current generated by potatoes. Nice. Today's picture shows the power supply. Apparently, it takes about a dozen potatoes to run the thing, and they change the potatoes "every few days." You can get served an actual page from the spud server at http://152.78.65.48:2300, but since slashdot is running the story right now you probably won't get through. I remember doing experiments in science class when I was young where we would hook up potatoes to power a tiny lightbulb. I remember wondering why we don't power everything this way since you can just grow the things in the ground (and then eat them when they run out of power,) and I have to admit that I am still wondering the same thing.
Thanks to V & S for their weekend hospitality. With all this rain, Long Island is LUSH. Nice to get away from the keyboard for a day and a half. Hey, my hands don't hurt today!
I didn't mean for this page to only be about privacy/security issues, but these seem to be the most important things going on right now. Here's the latest. Real (makers of the Realplayer which allows you to view streaming audio and video compressed in the real formats - file type: .rm) has a nifty new way to spy on you. I don't use any Real products after the last privacy fiasco, but undaunted by that bad press, they're back with an even more intrusive scheme. Installing the new Real software now places a program called Download Demon on your computer. This program, without any warning, is installed as the DEFAULT Download manager for your browser (strike one.) If you use your browser for FTP connections, the Download Demon quietly records the URL and filename of every file you download (strike two) and (again quietly, without any prompting) connects to Real and uploads this info to the mothership (strike three - please delete all Real products from your computer.) This is according to the very reliable TBTF. I'm not going to test this myself, but I will continue to follow the story. I almost think this couldn't possibly be true, as it seems illegal at best, but stranger things have happened... I mean, sure, the FTP connection is monitored already, but I don't need additional monitoring from the private sector. Big business is free to PAY me for my personal data (if I accept their offer, which I won't,) but really this is getting ridiculous.
Whoops. I've been away for 2 days and the place is falling apart. Seem to have lost a few threads (although everything is there in the database.) Not sure what the deal is, but probably has something to do with those changes I made (and didn't really test too much) before I left. I'll get it sorted first thing in the morning. Sorry.
The more you learn the more you wonder who the hell is in charge. Apparently Microsoft Outlook surpresses the file type extension on attachments (i.e., the .vbs or .exe part of the filename.) Huh? I'd love to hear the reasoning behind this. Apparently nobody told Janet Reno about this because her advice (which was mine also) to not open files that have the .vbs extension doesn't make much sense (since you can't see the .vbs by default in Outlook.) This makes the virus situation much more difficult to deal with. I am led to believe that you can disable this surpression (it is on by default, but changeable.) Unfortunately I do not know how to go about doing this, but you might want to look into this if you are using Outlook. Look for something in Preferences that mentions attachments and extensions or file type. And while we are on the subject, here is a great summary of the kind of crap that Redmond tries to pull. You've got to love bug business. (I swear that was a typo, but I'm not going to fix it.)
Some views of the construction of a hypercube for your viewing pleasure today. If you start with a point (one dimension) and extend it in one direction you get a line. Now, perpendicular to the last extension, extend the line and you get a plane. Extend the plane (again, perpendicular to the last movement) and you fill in a cube. And then comes the hard part to visualize: extend the cube (somehow perpendicular to the last movement) and you get a hypercube. Strange. Hard to imagine. Different viewing angles give very different views of this shape. Dali used the unfolded version of the hypercube 
In many science fiction tales (I remember those Madeline L'engel children's books) the hypercube (tesseract) is used as a teleportation device. Much like a maze drawn in 2 dimension (like on paper) is trivial if you can pick up your pen (into the higher, 3rd dimension) and put it back down at the exit, a 3 dimensional being could appear to transport to a different (non contiguous) part of space by having access to the higher dimensional hypercube.
Another virus for the windows/outlook express crowd. I'm rather puzzled by the press coverage though. This one is nasty, sure. Tries to erase your hard drive. Not nice. But come on, this is easy to deal with. These virus' are written in Visual Basic (snickers from the stuck up geeks.) In order to execute, a visual basic file name must end in '.vbs'. Another extension to watch out for is '.exe'. The answer to 99% of these problems is just to look at the extension on any attachment you receive (even from a name you trust.) If it ends in either .vbs or .exe throw it in the trash. Simple. I wonder if these news agencies feel they will be liable in some way if they give any advice. Strange that they hype it up so much, and talk about virus protection programs, and never just say how easy it is to watch your own back. Or is it that they think people are sort of stupid?
Some talk at Hack the Planet about Apple's old Newton PDA. Made me wonder about a few things. First some background. Everybody is reporting that the much rumored Apple branded Palm Pilot is not happening. Apple is officially saying they have NO PDA in development. This has left the door open, and led people to speculate that the widely reported PDA effort at Apple has morphed into a tablet web appliance type thing (thus allowing for top brass to mislead people with the no pda line - "well, it's not a pda, it's a tablet.") Fine. This sounds reasonable. With Apple's proven knack for industrial design, the web appliance category is clearly in their sites. (Really, I think only Sony can challenge them, although placing Apple so high on the list of future powers might seem bizarre to some people.) This will be a huge market. Probably much bigger than the whole PC market. So, what is this thing going to run. Strongarm? I don't think so. G3? Too hot, too high of a power drain. G4? No. Same reasons, plus, Motorolla can't even supply enough for the desktop line. So what's the deal? Could it be that porting Darwin to x86 (which is NOT porting OS X to x86, but is a first step) is a prelude to bringing Transmeta on board? A transmeta powered, Apple branded, OS X running, wireless (airport) tablet? Pure speculation.
Can you identify today's picture? (I know, cheap humor, plus it's been around a lot, but hey, it's all I could find.)
I've been ignoring this one because it seems way too crazy to actually pass. Unfortunately it has already passed the Senate, and is waiting on a vote in the house. I guess it would be struck down eventually in the courts even if it did make it into law, but still... (Don't rant, don't rant, don't rant...) All I'm going to say is that I am definitely moving out of the coutry if this one passes. Here's the full text of the bill.
Slashdot released the letter they sent in response to Microsoft's letter asking (telling) them to remove some posts that alledgedly violated their copyrights (one or two probably did.) Very tough stuff. Seems reasonable that they would take this approach, figuring Microsoft won't want the bad publicity right now. And not that I've seen a lot of legal documents, but I didn't think they could be this straightforward and readable. It's actually funny it's so bold.
Today is the first day I'm getting reasonable response times from the site. Not sure what the deal is, but I haven't made any major optimizations. This makes me feel good in the sense that it's not all my fault (because sometimes, like today, it works O.K.) Must be some variable loads on our server (coming from other accounts.) Hope it stays like this. Eventually we'll get our own box and then it should be more consistently speeded up. When? you ask. I don't know.
Microsoft released a patch for that browser hole (the cookie one.) You should probably try to install this if you're using ie on windows. (via blogger)
huh? New trend in interface design? (Requires Flash 4.)
I am an idiot. This afternoon I've been building the editing system for the individual pages, and I accidently erased my apple page that was underneath this one. I am going to take it as a sign that I shouldn't have that page. Luckily I didn't erase the whole database. Must be careful with that mysql delete command!
I'm listening to: Louis Armstrong Hot Fives and Sevens
Most recent book purchace: Cascading Style Sheets: the definitive guide
Mailing lists I'm still on: CHI-web (computer, human interface)
Mailing lists I'm no longer on: Blueworld Dreamweaver list, and that ridiculously high volume Flash list.
old computer I'm using now: Power Computing Power Center pro (with 128 megs ram and a 19'' Radius monitor.)
Newer computer I will get back soon from the lovely MB: Blue and white G3 400 with 256meg ram and 37gigs of storage.
Favorite recent blog topic: riotHero's soul searching about whether he should experiment with drugs.
Most overpriced meal I've had lately: Tabla
Best restaurant that is so crowded I don't want to go anymore: 71 Clinton St.
Slow day so far (from where I sit) so I'm digging this one out of the vaults: The Hobbes' Internet Timeline, the self described "definitive internet history." Bland and dry with just a hint of geekish excitement. For instance, today's picture is supposedly the diagram of the first imp to host connection set up in September of 1969 at UCLA. Good thing they had it so well planned out.
IBM, and Altavista have combined on a web mapping project. One of the more cartoon like results is featured as today's picture. Here's a short explanation from the IBM site:
Our analysis reveals an interesting picture (Figure 9) of the web's macroscopic structure. Most (over 90%) of the approximately 203 million nodes in our crawl form a single connected component if hyperlinks are treated as undirected edges. This connected web breaks naturally into four pieces. The first piece is a central core, all of whose pages can reach one another along directed hyperlinks -- this "giant strongly connected component" (SCC) is at the heart of the web. The second and third pieces are called IN and OUT. IN consists of pages that can reach the SCC, but cannot be reached from it - possibly new sites that people have not yet discovered and linked to. OUT consists of pages that are accessible from the SCC, but do not link back to it, such as corporate websites that contain only internal links. Finally, the TENDRILS contain pages that cannot reach the SCC, and cannot be reached from the SCC. Perhaps the most surprising fact is that the size of the SCC is relatively small -- it comprises about 56M pages. Each of the other three sets contain about 44M pages -- thus, all four sets have roughly the same size.
O.K., I finally read that feed piece about weblogs. Dave and Alex both told me to, but I guess we all take our own time. Right on, though, I think.
Very interesting piece at the EETimes about the cable industry adopting MPEG-4 as their streaming media standard (over closed proprietary systems from microsoft, real and apple.) Sounds like some good thinking. I like this part: "...with channels 1 to 300 dedicated to broadcasting digital TV programs and channels 301 to 3 million [reserved] for streaming high-quality video on demand." I can hear it now, "Please tune in to channel one million seven hundred and fifty thousand four hundred and twenty three..."
Here's a link to the Foresight Institute's Engines of Creation 2000 Confronting Singularity conference page. The conference is happening next weekend. The page outlines some of the thinking behind the event. Here's a blurb:
In the next one-to-three decades we expect to see these capabilities:
"strong" nanotechnology
genetic engineering of humans
the end of aging
advanced machine intelligence (call it what you will)
encrypted private currencies
thorough surveillance and sensing, able to detect what you ate,drank, and smoked last night
bio/chem/nano weapons of mass destruction
human civilization expanding into space
Such a future is so different from human history that we can barely imagine it. Some call it a "Singularity" beyond which our best projections are useless...
Heady stuff from some very well respected researchers.
I am having some email problems today. Try my inch account if you need to get me.
Apparently, the U.S. had plans to detonate a huge nuclear explosion on the moon in the late fifties in order to demonstrate their military power, and one-up the successful Soviet space program. In an effort to cut down on my ranting I'm not going to say anything more about this one (except that some of these people are still in power, and they need not to be.)
I bought David Chalmers book "The Conscious Mind" when it came out in 1996. It was right up my alley, but frankly, just a little too hard. A lot of the science got pretty technical, and my schooling was all on the philosophy side. But Chalmers is a philosopher, and those parts of the book where he actually makes his argument (especially the concluding chapter) really made a huge impact on me. Still, I was always a little frustrated at not being able to digest the whole thing. A few days ago I found this link to a paper he wrote that is like a shorter version of the book. All the philosophy, without all of the backing scientific examples. Now, don't get me wrong, this guy is out of his mind smart, and he's very deep into a highly specialized field full of jargon, so I can't exactly recommend this as a quick read. Probably it's not even interesting. But if you happen to like any of the more popular people in the field (like maybe Daniel Dennet) then Chalmers is where to go from there. He is laying the groundwork for the type of thinking that will be needed to tackle the questions our technology, and especially our information processing systems, are going to present. And oh yeah, I found the link through a review on Hedweb in which the reviewer finds him both lazy and facile. Well, I wonder what he'd make of me, because I think Chalmers is hard at work on something very ambitious.
Another security hole exposed - this time in Navigator. Apparently, the way Navigator validates SSL sessions is not totally secure. It's not generally as bad as the IE cookie problem, but it's a problem nonetheless (and possibly it's worse in a very circumscribed set of circumstances.) It's not as bad becasue a) it is very difficult to exploit this problem and b) the problem is already fixed in the latest 4.73 version of Navigator. If you use Netscape (especially when making secure e-commerce connections over https:,) go download the latest version!
Free software philosophy trying to sprout geo-political wings. I don't know if it will fly, but I like the sound of this.
Outrage in the Blogger world. Apparently it's true. Mattel is going to try to take this domain away from Matt Lavallee. When I first heard this I absolutely did not believe it. Not the kind of did not believe it like "oh my god, I don't believe it" but the kind like, "that can't be true, I'm not going to fall for that put on." How can a company Mattel, sue a person over an obviously personal, non commercial site because the url is mattl.com? Especially since that's his name: Matt L. So evidently, by Mattel's reasoning, copyrights cover all similar sounding words or phrases, even when used in contexts where no possible confusion could occur. As Matt himself said: "...put simply:OMFG." He promises to post the text of the cease and desist letter tomorrow.
I've been saying it for a few months: wrist watches are almost getting good enough. Here's the latest. Very Dick Tracy. (via, cockybastard, where I had never visited, but since he won the webby for best personal site, I gave him a look see.)
It's anti-microsoft day at barbelith and whatever they say goes (if Grant Morrison hung out on your site, I'd believe what you said too.) Although, actually, I haven't been reading barbelith every day, so I nicked this from rasterweb (which I do read every day.) Anyway, I'm joining in.
So there.
Today's photo is a shot of the mir space station in orbit. The Russians are preparing for a spacewalk in which they will try to patch some exterior cracks with some sort of glue. Story and photo from the BBC. Not much of a story really, but I love the way the American media always refers to mir with a little snicker, like it's some antiquated bucket of scrap metal floating around up there. And while it is true that it is very old, and most of us have more computing power on our desks than it has in total, the mere (mir?) fact that it's still up there is an amazing testament to some seriously quality engineering. And on an unrelated side note, what is that line in Dylan's Visions of Johanna that always sounds to me like: "She's delicate, she seems like the (Mir?)/ but she just makes it all too concise and too clear/ that Johannas not here..." I know it's not 'Mir' but I always think of it that way.
Looks like Metallica might be sorry for filing legal action against 330,000 of their fans. Napster has used an interesting clause in the DMCA to turn the tables on the band. Apparently, Napster is required to kick all of those people off their system, but if the individuals claim that they were falsely accused, then Metallica has to pursue legal action against each individual. And if they fail to do so in 10 days, then they forfeit, and the accounts are reinstated. Of course, everyone just signed up for new accounts under different names right away, but hopefully many people will claim false accusation (using the handy one click form that Napster is providing) and Metallica doesn't possibly have enough money to sue hundreds of thousands of individuals. Salon has the scoop.
About the only story that could rival that huge javascript hole in IE for pure explosive power, is this one: Microsoft is trying to force Slashdot to remove certain reader postings that supposedly violate their copyright under the DMCA (which is the very evil Digital Millennium Copyright Act.) Talk about opening a can of worms. I almost wonder if they did this to divert attention from the javascript blunder. Read all about it here including the full text of the letter from microsoft lawyers, and the initial slashdot response (which cleverly reminds them that internet service providers - like, oh I don't know, let's say HOTMAIL - are not responsible for their users content. If microsoft was responsible for everything on hotmail (which every law dodging, warez trading, black hat in the world uses as a throwaway mailbox for all sorts of nefarious deeds) Bill Gates would be going to jail for a long time.) Anyway, the noise from this one is going to be huge. Admittedly, one or two of the many posts in question actually did contain the entire text of some microsoft copyrighted materials, but the question is still open about whether Slashdot (now Andover.net) is responsible for all the reader posted content on their system. And the rest of the posts microsoft is asking to have removed are clearly legal (they are mostly links to other copies of the copyrighted material, and link are legal no matter what they point to as 2600 proved in their fight against the MPAA over decss - how's that for tightly packed insider news?) For slashdot this must be like a cake of gold falling from heaven into their laps. "Just make sure you spell our name right" is all they really needed to reply. All ready this story is spreading like wild fire across the net (and the document in question has been mirrored at dozens of sites.) And, who knows, maybe slashdot can fight this one through to the eventual defeat and repeal of the DMCA itself ?!!?! Talk about David slaying Goliath (even when David is worth a couple hundred million,) this is going to be great for slashdot. I caught the story about an hour ago, and their were 520 reader comments. I just checked back and it's way over 800. Go, you geeky freedom fighters.
Oh boy, I don't know where to start. What an afternoon. I thought the morning was kind of slow, but here we go. First, a massive security hold was found in Microsoft Internet Explorer running on Windows systems (both 95 and 98 confirmed, still waiting to hear about NT and 2000.) Basically this hole lets a hostile web site view your cookies. This is not a problem with cookies (which some people like to say are unsecure) but with Microsofts implementation of javascript. If you are using IE on Windows, and you don't want other people to know where you go on the web, you should immediately turn off javascript. (On IE for the mac this is done in the edit menu by selecting preferences, and then choosing 'web content' (which is under WEB BROWSER on the left) and then deselecting enable scripting? in the Active Content section. If windows is different, someone please clue me in. Note: javascript is not java and has nothing to do with java - although you might want to turn that off too.) "Who cares" you ask? Well, dismissing the obvious oceans of porn that of course nobody ever looks at, what about your on line brokerage account? What about all your accounts that remember your password (like this one?) What about your account on the gay and lesbian alliance site that you didn't want your evil employer to know about? All of these things are stored as cookies on your machine, and only you should have access to them. Javascript is very good at keeping hostile website's code from gaining any sort of access to your machine (outside of that codes sandbox.) Microsoft's is unfortunately not so good. But everybody makes mistakes, the real test of their ethics will be how long it takes them to patch this. (If it were an open source program there would already be several patches available to solve this problem.) The clock is ticking Redmond...
Here's the code from the ILOVEYOU visual basic worm/trojan horse. (Well, I can't prove that this is it, but since I believe cam and he says this is it... I actually received zero copies of it, or I would have caught a version myself. Visual basic looks worse than Perl! (Although granted, the line breaks got mangled on this version.)
And I thought legos were cool when I was a kid. Now they have those computer controlled robot legos (called Mindstorm,) and I just heard about the plans forLego world digital movie studio. Too cool. I'd love to see what Steve's nephew would make with this thing (or even what Steve would make with it.)
Here I go again. I just can't help it. Not enough time to really do anything more, but I still want to note all these cool but basically unimportant tech stories. Oh well. For now this is what it is.